One primary difference between the police department and the sheriff’s office is that the police serve a municipality while the sheriff serves a county. As a kid, I never pictured a big city as having a sheriff. I mean, in Philly, we had police. And since our city and county are one and the same, does Philly even have a sheriff’s office?

Sadly, the answer is yes, and as discussed in this week’s Philadelphia Inquirer article, it has been even more corrupt than any of the aforementioned—going on 300+ years now. Ok, maybe that is an exaggeration. William Penn founded the first Philly sheriff’s office in 1682; however, the current office was founded in 1838, and soon after is about when the documented corruption started. In 1878, Philly Sheriff William Leeds is accused for handing out contracts to his Republican cronies, “who dominated city elections for decades following the Civil War.” The Philadelphia Times opines that these contracts are a “gigantic corruption and coercion fund.” The city was ruled by the Republican machine for 100 years after the Civil War, and during that time, the Sheriff’s office was riddled with corrupt sheriff after corrupt sheriff.

• Sheriff Enoch Taylor—accused of embezzling sheriff sale proceeds and fixing juries.
• Sheriff “Big Tom” Cunningham somehow donates more than 8 times his annual salary to the head of the Republican machine.
• Sheriff Austin Meehan, whose family controlled the GOP machine for decades to follow, was accused of diverting taxpayer funds to his party coffers and resisted reform efforts to dissolve the Sheriff’s Office.

Then, in the mid-20th century, reform and the new City Charter came to Philly. The Sheriff’s Office was cleaned up at first yet calls to abolish it were resisted by both parties in Harrisburg. There have been multiple attempts to abolish the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office over the past 75 years. All of them have failed.

Anyway, by the 1970s, the Democratic machine had been firmly in control of the city for over two decades, and do things look any better? Nope. Say goodbye to the old corrupt boss and hello to the new corrupt boss. Several minor corruption scandals in the 1970s and ‘80s came next. They weren’t really minor, by the way, except compared with what came next.

• Sheriff John D. Green was in office from 1988-2010. After way too many controversies and too much corruption to mention in this newsletter, in 2019, he pled guilty to corruption in office and was sentenced to five years in prison. John Green was Philly’s longest serving sheriff. And the sheriff who served the most time in prison.
• Sheriff Jewell Williams faced multiple sexual harassment lawsuits that cost the city over $500,000 in settlements.
• Sheriff Rochelle Bilal. The current Sheriff. She ran for Sheriff as such a strong reformer that she openly celebrated John Green’s sentencing for corruption. How did her reforms turn out? I would have to write multiple articles to describe the accusations of malfeasance, incompetence, and patronage in her office. Luckily, the Philadelphia Inquirer already has. Like when “former senior staffers say they lost their jobs in 2020 after exposing serious wrongdoing — including alleged financial impropriety and sexual harassment,” for awarding a controversial no-bid contract, for alleged dereliction of duty over failure to sell tax delinquent properties for the past three years, a backlog of thousands of unserved protective firearms orders meant to protect victims of abuse, and “stonewalling” former property owners who are owed funds by her office.” And her second in command was fined by the Board of Ethics for an outrageous conflict of interest.